A PowerShell snapin contains extra
cmdlets, usually for a specialist purpose such as Quest's Active directory
family of cmdlets. The trick is to append, inject, register, or wire up
PowerShell to accept additional verb-Noun pairs from other providers.
Pre-requisites
The only slight problem with this challenge is that it needs two
pre-requisites over-And-above installing PowerShell. Firstly, download the snap-In from the
third party such as
Quest. Because without a snap-In the command, add-PSSnapin makes no sense.
Your plan B would be to substitute one of the growing number of third-party
snap-Ins for Quest.
Secondly, to get any action from the additional Quest active directory snap-In you need to logon as
administrator of a
domain. I downloaded and installed the snap-In, then I ran the following command on a Domain Controller.
I say again, if you don't have a domain, research the internet for alternative
snap-Ins.
# Simple Instruction for PowerShell snapin
set-Location c:\
add-PSSnapin quest.activeroles.admanagement
Note 1: Please navigate to wherever you downloaded the
snap-In. I used the c:\ root for simplicity, but your path is likely to be
different, hence adjust set-Location in the above script.
Note 2: If these commands don't reveal the quest
snap-Ins, you probably missed one of my pre-requisites. As I mentioned earlier, you
must download and install the quest.activeroles.admanagement snap-In from Quest's site, and you need
access to
an active directory domain.
If you substitute the verb 'get' for 'add', then PSSnapin will display all
registered snap-Ins including the
Microsoft default sets.
# Optional instruction to display all PowerShell Snap-Ins Clear-Host
Get-PSSnapin | ft name
Expected results:
PowerShell 1.0
November 2008
Name
-------------------------
Microsoft.PowerShell.Core
Microsoft.PowerShell.Host
Microsoft.PowerShell.Management
Microsoft.PowerShell.Security
Microsoft.PowerShell.Utility quest.activeroles.admanagement
PowerShell 2.0 April 2010
Name ------------------------ Microsoft.PowerShell.Core
Microsoft.PowerShell.Diagnostics
Microsoft.PowerShell.Host Microsoft.PowerShell.Management
Microsoft.PowerShell.Security Microsoft.PowerShell.Utility
Microsoft.WSMan.Management quest.activeroles.admanagement
Note 1: Did you get just the Microsoft
snap-Ins? Or
did you get a snap-In from quest?
Note 2: In PowerShell 2.0 I also added remoting, hence
the WSMan snapin.
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As we will see, the killer reason for mastering profile.ps1 is so that you
can load PSSnapins. As a result of this procedure PowerShell will load extra cmdlets
effortlessly each time it starts.
Once you achieve mastery in a particular area, any difficulties that you endured during the
learning process seem to fade into the background. So it is with
understanding Profile.ps1. Configuring this file is ridiculously easy once you have mastered it, but impenetrably difficult
when you try and figure it out for the first time.
Pure Profile.ps1
The secret of setting-up profile.ps1 is attention to spelling. In
particular, the filename 'profile' must be singular, and the directory name must be precisely: 'WindowsPowerShell'.
Let me give you a few pointers with the text file profile.ps1. The file must be called precisely profile.ps1. The name profileS.psL would be
doubly wrong because of the plural filename and 'L' instead of a 1
in the extension.
You must save profile.ps1 into a specific directory. Begin your
drill-down by navigating to the C:\Documents and
Settings folder. Next you need to know the Windows profile name for the user who is logged on, in
my case \guyt. The rest of the path is My Documents\WindowsPowerShell.
Pay close attention to the folder name: WindowsPowerShell. Here is my full path.
C:\Documents and Settings\guyt\My Documents\WindowsPowerShell
It is in the above WindowsPowerShell folder that I save profile.ps1.
There is a whole micro-Industry in creating clever instructions for
profile.ps1, (just as there was tweaking the old DOS autoexec.bat). For
our mission we will focus on just two instructions, setting the HOME directory
and loading snap-Ins.
# Simple instruction for Profile.ps1 (Feel free to amend c:\)
set-Location c:\
I always like to build on success, thus I include the simple command, 'set-Location c:\'
merely to show that PowerShell is in fact reading profile.ps1. If this
works and PowerShell opens at the c:\ prompt, then you could try a more realistic 'home' directory for
your PowerShell, for example, set-Location c:\PowerShell (Providing you have a folder
called precisely, PowerShell).
»
Summary of PowerShell's Add-PSSnapin
If you need to employ PowerShell to manipulate active directory, then seek
additional cmdlets. The best the best sources are Quest and PowerGUI. Additionally,
if you need to control PowerShell's start-up environment, then
take the time to create and configure profile.ps1.
Once you have installed the snap-Ins, you
need a command to load them each time PowerShell launches, that command is : add-PSSnapin. Why not get the best of both worlds? Master profile.ps1 and
make sure that the quest.activeroles.admanagement snap-In is always available.
If you like this page then please share it with your friends
Please email me if you have a better example script. Also please report any factual mistakes, grammatical errors or broken links, I will be happy to correct the fault.
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